Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Now the War on Thanksgiving
Chuck Norris blather in his Townhall website column:
Norris also parades all the usual stuff about Thomas Jefferson really being a church kind of guy, mentions his support for missionary activity among the Indians. I doubt if the spiritual welfare of Native Americans was Jefferson's main concern; rather, converting Indians to belief in the white man's deity was a method for making them submit to white authority without killing them outright. White Father in Washington speaks for White Father in sky. Indigenous tribal & unconverted African people constituted a huge non Judeo-Christian population in the 19th century, but only white people were considered Americans, & many of them barely so.
As it turns out, Chuck's column is a misunderstanding of another writer's response to a Washington Post editorial for which Norris provides no link. The "facts" he's facing are not even factual.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Let's face the present Thanksgiving facts. President Bush likely will give the last explicit Judeo-Christian Thanksgiving proclamation that Americans will hear for the next four to eight years, as President-elect Obama likely will coddle a form of godliness in his Thanksgiving addresses (if he indeed gives them) that appeases the masses with a deity that fits every politically correct dress.Chuck then suggests that next year President Obama should use Lincoln's 1863 Proclamation establishing Thanksgiving Day, itself a perfect model of blandly generic political religiosity guaranteed to appease practically everyone, & containing no specific Christian content. Lincoln was a master of the style, on a few occasions lifting it to a level of literary art. But not this occasion.
Norris also parades all the usual stuff about Thomas Jefferson really being a church kind of guy, mentions his support for missionary activity among the Indians. I doubt if the spiritual welfare of Native Americans was Jefferson's main concern; rather, converting Indians to belief in the white man's deity was a method for making them submit to white authority without killing them outright. White Father in Washington speaks for White Father in sky. Indigenous tribal & unconverted African people constituted a huge non Judeo-Christian population in the 19th century, but only white people were considered Americans, & many of them barely so.
As it turns out, Chuck's column is a misunderstanding of another writer's response to a Washington Post editorial for which Norris provides no link. The "facts" he's facing are not even factual.
